La Jetée

Cinema itself is a trick of time — still pictures passed through a focused beam of light at 24 frames per second. We are reminded of that in La Jetée, Chris Marker’s 28-min.-long meditation on time travel, apocalypse and fate. Composed almost entirely of black-and-white still frames, voice-over and an elegiac score, La Jetée propels its main character through time — from a ruined postwar Paris back to his own days as a young boy in the City of Lights, where he falls deeply in love. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because Terry Gilliam essentially remade it as the full-length 12 Monkeys. Only one scene in the film steps away from still photographs to show a brief flicker of movement. The shot is so beautiful, the moment so unexpected, that it’s literally breathtaking.